No One Cares About the Asteroid

A gigantic asteroid silently flew past our planet, avoiding us by a mere 45,000 miles. The thing is, it was undetected. Why is it that no one seems to care about this. Most people just shrug and say, oh well. Nothing much we can do about it anyway. I even told my friend Clara that maybe we could prepare to hit it with one of our powerful nuclear warheads? “That’s only in the movies,” she responded. This is what happens when you ask a dumb question. Here I was, obsessing on Bernie Madoff (how could he have…how could anyone have…how could the SEC have…), and mildly meditating on a PBS documentary I saw last night on the guy who invented the labotomy. And all this time I could have been nurturing free-floating anxiety about the asteroid. It’s not like it’s never happened before.